In some circumstances it is desirable to have more than one land station in, for example, a transatlantic telecommunication system between the USA on the one hand and Europe on the other hand. Thus both the UK and France may be connected to the same transatlantic cable. This would have two advantages. Firstly it would enable the transatlantic cable to be kept fully occupied during slack periods of either the French or UK traffic by routing traffic of the busier country through the other country to the cable rather than hold up some of the busier traffic. Secondly should a fault occur in one branch the other branch would still be able to handle the traffic of both the UK and France.